IFS LAST month's partial Israeli' military pullout from Hebron, marked the first move by the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, to actively implement the peace accords he had inherited, the release yesterday of female Palestinian prisoners from Israel's jails marked the second.
And yesterday, as a month ago, the hardline right-wing protests and charges of betrayal were bitter, and included desperate petitions to the supreme court for intervention, but ultimately proved marginal. This underlined the solidifying left-moderate right consensus in Israel behind the peace process.
More than a year behind schedule, the first of 31 female prisoners began emerging from Israeli jails in the course of the afternoon.
One of them, Ms Lamia Maroul, who had been serving a life term for renting and driving the car used by Palestinian gunmen to murder an Israeli soldier, David Manos, 12 years ago, was taken straight to the airport and put on a plane to Brazil, where she was born.
Not all the releases were completed by yesterday evening. A group of Israelis who have lost relatives in attacks by Palestinians again petitioned the Supreme Court to block the freeing of some of the women, whose names did not appear on earlier lists of those being freed.
The petition was clearly only a delaying tactic; the court had already ruled that it had no authority to intervene in the political decision to sanction the releases.
But it did have the effect of delaying a festive reception planned for the women in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Undeterred by the minor, 11th-hour hitch, the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, who had travelled to Ramallah for the celebration, said the releases would "help the relationship between the two peoples."
Mrs Ora Klein, whose husband Zvi was, gunned down in Ramallah in 1991 by a cell headed by Ms Abir Wahidi, another of the women freed yesterday, told the court that the releases were "a nightmare for me," and that she, felt she was living "in a world turned upside down."
One of Israel's leading legal commentators, Mr Moshe Negbi, also criticised the move.
He argued that there would now, be intense right-wing pressure to pardon and free some 20 Jews serving time for violent attacks on Palestinians, and that the impression was being created that murder for "nationalist" reasons was far less heinous a crime than, say, tax evasion or theft, offences for which convicts served out their sentences.
But the Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr David Levy, defended the releases, reasoning that Israel had to "honour its commitments" to the Palestinians if it expected the Palestinians to honour theirs.
Mrs Klein yesterday unveiled a memorial to her late husband at the West Bank settlement of Beit El. Meanwhile, another resident of the same settlement, Ms Margalit Har-Shefi, was ducking the limelight.
Ms Har-Shefi, a friend of Yigal Amir, the man who assassinated the prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, 15 months ago, was indicted yesterday for failing to prevent the murder, and for having directed Amir to a weapons and ammunition storage room.
. In a marked escalation of fighting, Israel yesterday carried out three air raids deep inside Lebanon, hitting a Hizbullah radio station inside Syrian-controlled territory and injuring the commander of a Palestinian rejectionist group.
Israel has charged Syria with encouraging intensified Hizbullah attacks on its positions there.